Saturday, 5 October 2013

Her laughter that rang out like a spoon struck upon a platehung in the air, and all the phones in that lost world went dead at once
the wind blew husklike clouds across an amber moon.................................................................the years if only, for an instant...

12 comments:

These words (when there are so few of them it seems wrong or silly somehow to excerpt, but "husklike clouds across an amber moon" says a lot to me, as does "the years/if only, for an instant...") and pictures really resonate in me. We adopted Jane in China at during Moon Festival time and I remember sitting outside our hotel on a beautiful veranda near the Pearl River with Caroline and the baby watching the moon, listening to a small ensemble of musicians playing on stringed instruments, and trying to figure out all those unknown next steps in dealing with an infant. I also remember in college taking a course in pre-Socratic philosophy and the teacher spinning his once-in-a-lifetime poetic comment about Thales probably arriving at certain conclusions lying on hillsides in Asia Minor looking up at the moonlit sky. Quite often I wish the phones would go dead -- at least the cell phones that have increased stress levels so sharply. Curtis

One can only imagine and remember rather than speak from present experience about that world in which people could actually be assumed to be occupying the space they appeared to be occupying -- as vs. absenting themselves by becoming blank terminal points, passive data entry stations in the overarching control systems which every day render individual and particular responses increasingly irrelevant to what happens in the drifting-beyond-contact monadic free-fall that currently passes for a society.

The sound of certain people’s voices in certain moments will stay with me for decades: timbre, pitch, modulations . . . I can recall them forty or more years later. Many were close to me, some weren’t. I marvel at this, take it as a kind of connection that remains open for reasons unknown; or a closeness I didn’t sense or appreciate earlier in this same life.

Yes, the one clear benefit in ageing I can identify (in with all the massive drawbacks, that is), is the intermittent clarity, all personal affect withdrawn, when a person, thing or place which we'd thought familiar suddenly becomes as if for the first time apparent, all predispositions withdrawn... for the moment.

Tom,Yes, those suddenly striking voices, "hung in the air . . . the years/ if only, for an instant... " Years ago I was hiking up the McGee Creek Trail in the eastern Sierra, three people coming down the other way, when I said "hello" the first guy suddenly turned back around and called out "Steve Ratcliffe!" -- having recognized my voice after not hearing it for years and years. . .